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LADY JOHN RUSSELL occurred the death of Lady Minto, Lady John's mother. During these months the world of politics had been going its way. In April both husband and wife expressed their delight in Gladstone's budget, and it seemed that after the excursions and alarms of 1851 and 1852 there was a chance of things going quietly and prosperously. But by the autumn the circumstances that led to the Crimean War became acute, and a holiday in Scotland was suddenly broken up by the necessity for Lord John's presence in London, where his wife joined him in October.

In the session of 1854 Lord John Russell found himself obliged to withdraw his Reform Bill. Lady John's letters well show her feeling towards political life, and form indeed a comment on the dangers and difficulties of that career for sincere and disinterested persons. Official friends made it their business to go to see her and to lay before her all the arguments for dropping the Bill, so that she might repeat them to her husband. She was assured that her husband had such a quantity of spare character that it could bear a little damaging. Her notion was that many members were afraid of losing their seats by dissolution, and many others hated any 85